I can only describe 2025 as a year of hills and valleys, mostly very dark valleys, but also some very bright hilltops. I would describe this year as a Mike Tyson year; you know the old quote, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth1.” It was a beatdown, but in the end, I have emerged with my head held high.
As I look through the goals for 2025, of course, I look at 2024 goals, and it looks like some of those goals were accomplished in 2025, which is pretty awesome to see manifestation happen, even if it is not on your intended timeline. One thing I have learned this year is to be very intentional and precise in your prayers, which has been empowering and helpful. I believe it has sped things up in my life in a very positive way.
Besides the goals, what happened this year anyway?
I look back at Christmas last year, which was the lowest of low holidays of my life. I was depressed, sick, and poorer than I have ever been. I was exhausted from my job in Oil and Gas; it was killing me. I put in my resignation at the end of January. It came crashing down. I left the apartment and never looked back, dropping the keys off to the lease truck I was driving. I never returned to Austin for work in 2025. The end of a very dark chapter.
The last week of February was offered a job with AnchorWatch, a company that sells insured Bitcoin vaults. This was an incredible opportunity at a unicorn type company that has 0 competition in the insurance market and a massive differentiator. Through March I studied for my insurance license and in April I passed the exams. I was officially able to sell insurance. So that was all very good, but there was darkness looming. I had to confront at minumum 5 years of trauma from Covid etc. I don’t really want to get into it in a blog post, but things were dealt with. I stared into the abyss and healed. I grew closer to God and have put more weight on him rather than trying to figure out things myself. Also I have a much more positive outlook. Honestly, Covid and the bitcoin community blackpilled me a bit and i developed a pretty bad sense of victim mentality. I am dealing with that but I feel so mush better, stronger, and I understand myself better. Not to mention I am more thankful for the little things. Pro-tip, take twitter off your phone!
My family life is strong, I am thankful for Clancy everyday and my daughters aer incredible. So yeah, you could say things are going pretty good.
Lookback and Recap 2025 Goals & Resolutions
Red = not accomplished
Blue = accomplished
Black = neutral needs context
Goals
- Invest Time in Clancy – I want to help her create art and pursue selling of art if she desires. Last year I had a monetary target listed as a goal, and yes, I want to help her make money, but that has to come at her time. This goal for me is about checking in with her often and doing the little things to help her ship art. I believe to accomplish this I will need to do the following:
- Protect her time – this is tough because my current schedule demands that I am away from home several days per week. I do not have a solution for this YET
- Reboot – get her away from kids on a vacation so she can truly reboot her heart.
- Do – do the little things in her studio and online to help her. Do the little things around the house to declutter and set her up to win.
- Financial Winning – this means moving up and to the right. I don’t have a monetary target I want to write down but I can describe what I want.
- Debt free
- Savings – for life and for a home down payment
- No worry about bills and life expenses
- These things will come through hard work in my professional life and could also come through lifting Clancy up. We don’t really have any way of knowing the earning potential from her art but it could change things in a very positive way.
- Prepare and Present Can’t Stop the Signal 2.0 – this is rebooting the presentation for focus on Drones. This is a low tier stretch goal.
- Need to build a drone myself from open source HW and SW. This might be a stretch, I do not see my investing in the hw sw for this in the next 3 months, so this will likely be a stretch. I could probably ship a presentation on this, just won’t be able to demo HW in person ( not a deal breaker). If not a. drone specific presentation, it should be a refresh on the original. So much has been developed in the past 24 months tons to share with those interested.
- Health Goals – instead of making a bunch of individual goals, I am lumping my heath goals into one overall goal.
- Bench 225 – this was within striking distance in 2024. Really focus on nutrition and supplements to get this.
- Run 10 miles – I think I am a long way off from this but it would be amazing to run 10 miles straight. Treadmill or on road, either will work. Slav Squat? Yes, take this seriously and stretch!
- Reading Goal – Read 6 books this year. 2024 was about scripture and it fed my soul. In 2025 I want to read 6 classics, not even sure what books but I know I need this.
- Memorization – memorize 6 passages from the Bible. Think Psalm 23 power.
- Find my place in the world – “this is about my career. I have been floating in the wind since I was let go at HPE in 2020, and this is a terrifying place to be in the year 2025 at age 40 with so much on the line (my wife and kids well being). I don’t know where I will go or what path I will take today but I do know that I trust in the Lord and that’s more than I could say a year or two ago.“q
- Find our forever home/community – is it North Texas? I don’t know. Is it back in Arkansas? It could be. I am praying on this guidance in a big way.
- Take a vacation with Clancy – we desperately need this.
Read
The most important things I read this year were the simplest, which was prayers and The Game of Life And How To Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn. I paired the leanings from this book plus Orthodox prayers and Carol Pate prayers and my outlook on life has improved substantially.
Listen
Lots of Kanye and lots of Phonk this year. Sprinkle in some Thomas Rhett and Forest Frank and you got my year.
Stats
Interesting to see that my tracking falls off every summer. I set a calendar reminder for July 1 so this doesn’t happen again, fingers crossed!
In 2024, I tried fasting for my first time, and it was an incredible experience. Although the first fast was only a 24-hour fast, it was the first time I had really experienced any kind of hunger in my entire life. Read that again. In 2025, I wanted to track and see how many days I could fast. I made a plan to try and fast for 21 days, and I only hit 13 total days. That’s a stretch from the goal, but a pretty awesome bar has been set. You can see in the summer I had an incredible multi-day fast, which was only possible because Clancy and the gals left town for over a week! I became light-headed and dizzy during the last two days; next time I will be taking some supplements to limit that fatigue.
Leaning into ecommerce in 2025
This was a year where I leaned into trying to monetize online. I have all the skills, just never really tried to build a funnel for myself. I learned a lot and built a couple cool projects too.
Orange Label
The Orange Label brand changed in 2025. In years past, it was a creative outlet to make psyop and meme posts, sell T-shirts, and shitpost with Bitcoiners. I was selling merch for The Bugle, but it was a handful of shirts and hats here and there; nothing meaningful, but it was fun to be a part of.
But the reality is that Bitcoiners DO NOT LIKE TO SPEND MONEY. This is the worst demo ever to try and sell merch to. They are poor in mind and would rather buy Bitcoin than spend money on merch. This isn’t really a knock, just a reality.
So this fall, when Charlie Kirk was psyop murdered, I made some T-shirts and hats like the ones he was wearing the day he died. I threw them on Etsy and my personal shop, and this was my first lesson in catching a viral wave in e-commerce.
This was an existing Etsy shop that I opened but NEVER listed anything or sold anything. I loaded MANY designs for Charlie Kirk-inspired merch, and it is still selling like 1 hat per week. Pretty interesting overall.
The Orange Label website had a MASSIVE uptick in september from the initial Charlie Kirk merch wave. You can see sales earlier in the year, as Orange Label was selling merch for The Bugle. They are now selling merch over at Bugleverse. Also it’s worth noting that i expanded the focus of Orange Label merch to include Christian merch and other patriotic wear. Why? Because I wanted to.
I will probably write up another post on the pivot and making new merch and models with AI, but here are some prodct shots with AI models.
It’s insane how good AI is these days. I started running ads like a madman and learned about ads on Meta and Google. That is VERY confusing, and I am no expert in that. I can see the value in people who do understand that.
H1B Explorer
In the summer vibe, coding was raging and I was determined to get in on the fun. For the longest time, I wanted to build a web app that you could dig into and explore H1B Visa data. It is so messed up, by the way, but I am optimistic! I had a bit of a mind virus about a website I needed to build, so I did it. H1B Explorer was born! I yelled at Cursor AI for 10 evenings and finally had a functioning website with dynamic charts and filters. It is pretty amazing what you can build if you know what to ask for… Prompting is powerful.
What is a directory anyway?
Then I stumbled upon the business model of monetizing directories. The idea is that you curate information for people, and you can monetize through ads and even upselling placements to listings on the directory website. I got the bright idea to build a directory of beef producers in the US. There is not a good directory that covers the US, so I built it.
Enter Beef Near Me.
I have been spamming Reddit once a week, and the site gets like 50 visitors a day. I mean that it’s pretty interesting, imho. It has banner ads all over it from Google AdSense, and I built it all in WordPress. This website looks awesome and works really well. I think it could make money through focused content on socials, building a strong mailing list, and if I could curate promotions from ranchers, I think it could be pretty awesome.
The website does not make a lot of money, but again, this was a big learingin about getting organic traffic and that eyeballs do equal money, you just need a bunch for ads to make sense.
Beef Near Me ad rev
$26 whopping dollars in revenue! Ads were off for the month of December too because I had to verify my ID, and it took a while to get my replacement ID in the mail for verification. But it is all working now.
Papercut
I can’t believe this but the band is getting back together. Mark and Annabelle launched a new publishing company called Papercut Publishing House, and I will be assisting in US distribution for early release print runs like presales. This is going to be fun. More to talk about with this at the ed of 2026, fingers crossed we ship some fun projects.
Funnels
The last development is leaning into monetizing social media. I have been lurking on this for a while and I am trying to understand how to make money in this space. The reality is there are a ton of scams out there, but there is also a lot of opportunity to educate people on the information I know, and there are plenty of folks who would pay for that.
I have built a couple of accounts with funnels through WordPress → Klaviyo/Mailchimp → ManyChat → Instagram. I am not sure where this will lead, but I already have some ideas on products I can sell, courses I can package, and other ways to monetize. More to come on this next year too. Things are built; time to ship, and it really is a game of numbers, imho. Well, bringing value and shipping frequently.
Let’s get it!
Goals for 2026
Ready for the fun part. What do you want this year?
- Run 100 Miles – this feels impossible so will be fun to see.
- Buy a house
- Get a 2 Door Tahoe
- Join a mens group or church group – (this is the third year I have set a goal for this)
- Make more this year than I have any other year in my life
- Vacation with Clancy without Kids
- 100x
- Get Really good at photography
- Make more with side hustle than with my salary job
- Clancy sell art and make $5,000 revenue herself in ART.
- Vibe Code an app that makes money
- 12 dates with Clancy
- Figure out affiliate marketing
- Get published in a magazine
- Go on a podcast
- Build my personal brand
- Ego death!!! Make content!
I have been writing this article for 3 days and I’m ready to ship it. Do i have other goals? Yeah.
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